Asteraceae
Achillea millefolium
Yarrow · Soldier’s woundwort · Milfoil
- Part used
- aerialflower
- Native range
- Northern hemisphere throughout; naturalised in Australia and New Zealand
- Morphology
- A tough perennial to about seventy centimetres with very finely divided feathery leaves — the species name means thousand-leaved — and flat-topped heads of small white or pink flowers.
What is in it
Evidence
Almost no controlled trials. Laboratory work supports haemostatic and anti-inflammatory activity, which has not been tested in people at any scale.
Safety
Generally well tolerated. Contact dermatitis is fairly common. Allergy in those sensitive to other Asteraceae. Avoided in pregnancy on traditional grounds and because of uterine-stimulant reports.
Regulatory: Permitted as a listed medicine ingredient.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Named for Achilles, who was said to have used it on his soldiers’ wounds. Consistently used across Europe as a wound and styptic herb, and for fever, and among many Native American peoples for comparable purposes.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Yarrow is the plant that connects two otherwise unrelated parts of this site. In Europe it is the soldiers' wound herb, named for Achilles and used to stop bleeding for three thousand years. In China its dried stalks are the traditional instrument for casting the Yijing — fifty of them, divided and counted, in the procedure whose odds differ from the coin method.
Two continents, one plant, two entirely separate uses, neither of which has anything to do with the other.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.